Maintenance Downtime – Saturday Oct. 4th at midnight (12:00AM Sunday)

We have a number of software updates that need to be applied as well as some new functionality being added. The most noticeable change will be the requirement of being friends before someone can send you a private message. This will no longer be a requirement. After the update anyone will be able to send you a message but if they are not on your friends list you will get a friend request with an option to preview their message. If you accept their friendship request you will then be added to the conversation started by your new friend. If you do not accept their friendship request they’ll be left alone, talking to themselves. (tina will not be amused)

Also, the pagination for topics and replies will be placed at the top of the page as well as the bottom. Actually I guess this would be the most noticeable change.

I expect the site to be closed for no more than an hour unless all goes well then around 15 to 20 minutes. I did not encounter any major sticking points while upgrading our staging environment so the production will hopefully go quickly.

Changing this to tomorrow night. Every day this week has turned into a Monday. Need to step away from the keyboard. lol

Tomorrow will not be a Monday.

Dave Lozier wrote:

Changing this to tomorrow night. Every day this week has turned into a Monday. Need to step away from the keyboard. lol

Tomorrow will not be a Monday.

I hear ya. For me, Friday is the new Monday.

Why does everything always go to hell on Friday?

Maybe it’s because we’re supposed to drink on the weekend

Why does everything always go to hell on Friday?

And about an hour before you “plan” to leave….grrrrr…

I expect the site to be closed for no more than an hour unless all goes well then around 15 to 20 minutes. I did not encounter any major sticking points while upgrading our staging environment so the production will hopefully go quickly.

Only a fellow developer can appreciate the belly laugh I got from these comments and your optimism

Aa a developer and an installer how many times have I heard?

“I only changed one line of code it will not be a problem.”

Good luck with the update. Hope it goes well.

LoL yeah I’ve hit the “was just one line of code” brick wall before. (gotta love old code maintenance when it wasn’t your code to start)

Our staging and production environments are mirrored pretty closely as far as the software stack they run on. The only difference with staging is user file uploads are not stored on a shared file system (GlusterFS) since it is a single server environment. Physically production has multiple front end servers and database servers behind a load balancer.

@biggill – had a streak of that here too! Just hope the other days don’t catch it. lol

I like turtles.

Who doesn’t like turtles? lol

I think I mentioned elsewhere here that I had looked at the code before that marks forums as read. I went back over it again and got it cleaned up and made it more functional. It now supports both all forums (on the page) and single forums for marking as read.

This will be in tonights updates. You’ll see a red check box icon that can be clicked to mark all read.

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   mark-all-read.png
   

I’m going to keep the doors open while I make some backups. You may experience some slow page loads here and there. Once I have the backups made I’ll be putting the site into maintenance mode.

I suppose I should have seen that one coming. Was the first real update of core code and to my surprise the WP-CLI command line tool wouldn’t work when the app servers were put into maintenance mode. Four hours of fun later and I think we’re doing fine again.

I think it was about three in the morning when I said to myself….

poor JustDave.

I learned to never say that is an easy change to a client or a project manager. I also learned never to give an estimate on the spot, the phrase “Let me look into it and I’ll get back to you” is my favorite. I don’t care if they are asking for frick’en simple style change like a color in CSS.

Its true, developers run on a different unit of time and schedule.

It wasn’t to bad – would have been quicker if I had given up on trying to make it work the way I wanted it to going in.

@mplspug – indeed! Just glad it was only tedious command line work and not working around code issues between product and staging. We’re going to need additional front-end app servers at some point so I’ll need to spend some time on the tools for making these code deployments fast. Fortunately the issue I ran into last night can be duplicated on staging so I’ll at least have a place to start from.